Weekend reading: Control yourselves

byThe InvestoronFebruary 4, 2017

Good reads from around the Web.

Well here we are, one month into the year of the people Taking Back Control. Isn’t it going well everyone?

In the UK the people have Taken Back Control and given it to a handful of Tory MPs. This right-wing minority of a centre-right party will now unilaterally establish how this country trades, regulates, and protects its citizens for generations.

What could possibly go wrong for the provincial masses1 who voted for Brexit?

Of course, MPs have been told they’ll get a vote on the final terms of our departure from the EU. And as this week has shown they’ll be called traitors and enemies of the people if they don’t simply wave it through.

What part of democracy don’t I understand? That’s what Brexiteers have been shouting all week, as they lambasted anyone who questioned giving the government the right to pull us out of Europe before we’d reached any sort of national consensus on what Brexit should and should not entail.

An admittedly Herculean task, given the flat-out contradictory hopes and motivations of Leave voters, but that’s on a Leave voter’s conscience, not mine.

No, we voted out, that’s the litmus test for all routes forward. That’s the constant refrain. It’s like going to the doctor because you have an ingrown toenail and seeing your leg amputated. “Yes, but we’ve dealt with the toenail!”

Top trumped

Meanwhile in the US the people have Taken Back Control and given it to a thin-skinned autocrat who seems to be deliberately probing the system for its weakest links. He’s also openly scornful of the international institutions and alliances assembled in the past 70 years to keep the great powers in check and stave off total war, and the globalization that has helped take a billion people out of poverty in the past 20 years.

And he is not wasting any time in sorting out America’s problems!

On Friday he announced his administration would tear into the post-financial crisis regulations to get banks to lending again.

He literally – I shit you not – stated that he has “friends” who can’t borrow.

But let’s cut him some slack; you can see the lack of lending pretty clearly in this chart from the US Federal Reserve:

I mean, I know it looks like total US commercial and industrial loans are now running about 30% higher than before the financial crisis.

But that’s just a fact!

You’ve get to get hip to alternative facts. You know, bogus funding claims written on buses, massacres that didn’t happen, nonsense theories that sound right but that are flatly wrong about the impact of immigration, trade, and so forth.

These distortions might all make for good sport in a world without nuclear weapons.

Unfortunately we don’t live in such a world. As with all his predecessors, a man follows the new President around day and night with the nuclear codes that enable him to begin World War 3 in about the time it takes to compose a Tweet.

Died in the wool

I would like to think those reasonable people who voted us out of Europe for reasons of sovereignty or even economics would at least now acknowledge the downsides of the alliance they made with nationalists, racists, and fascists to push them over the 50% mark.

Social media suggest they won’t. People are getting more entrenched, not less. There’s every chance it could get worse before it gets better.

I also don’t know if there are any Barry Blimps still reading Monevator. But there should be fewer than there were just through the natural attrition of the Leave voting cohort.

Here’s some – not to be taken hugely seriously – maths I shared with friends this week:

I’ve just been looking at Office for National Statistics data on deaths. I estimate at least 300,000 UK citizens have died since the Referendum.

Around 64% of over 65-year olds voted Leave, compared to just 29% of 18-24-year olds. Very few people die before 55, which is around the age that people started to favour Leave. Mostly the oldest Leave-ist voters die. Voter turnout was 72%.

Consider older people were more likely to turnout, assume people don’t change their vote as they get older, squint a bit, and I guestimate about 22,000 Leave voters are dying every month.

Brexit won by 1.2m votes. Within about five years Leave’s existing margin of victory will probably be dead, leaving us to lump it.

But wait – what about the new young? If we assume 70% or so would vote Remain and constant turnout, then Remain might win a Referendum within three years.

No wonder they want to trigger Article 50 and get us out in two.

(Caveat: All sums done in my head, your mileage may vary.)

Of course you can quibble with my assumptions.

For instance it’s possible young people are looking at the cabal of Conservative ministers heading off to Brussels to decide the future of the UK for themselves, at Nigel Farage chilling with Donald Trump, at the US refusing entry to its own legal residents for a period on a presidential whim and they’re thinking: “Hey, I don’t know what that guy is smoking but I want some of it!”

Product of the week:ThisIsMoneyreports that Tesco Bank has pledged not to cut the 3% interest rate paid on cash held in its current account for the next two years. That’s welcome, given how the likes of Santander have taken the axe to their own rates. Unfortunately you’re only paid 3% on balances up to a maximum of £3,000. Still, that’s good for £88 a year. [Insert obligatory “Every Little Helps” quip here.] [Update: See @BigPat’s comment below about holding multiple accounts as one individual!]

Mainstream media money

Some links are Google search results – in PC/desktop view these enable you to click through to read the piece without being a paid subscriber of that site.2

Book of the week: I hope it rains this weekend, as I can’t wait to get stuck into Ed Thorp’s autobiography: A Man For All Markets. Ed Thorp – who had lunch with the FT this week – was the first person to figure out the maths of card-counting in Vegas. He then went on to make millions on Wall Street, where his hedge funds pretty much pioneered quant investing. Thorp is in his mid-80s and his life story has just been published. I expect to be inspired!

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Yes, I understand not every Leave voter was a member of the provincial masses. Perhaps you weren’t. But they are the ones I am talking about here. See how it works? Maybe I’ll write about another kind of Brexit voter later on. Who can tell! [↩]

Note some articles can only be accessed through the search results if you’re using PC/desktop view (from mobile/tablet view they bring up the firewall/subscription page). To circumvent, switch your mobile browser to use the desktop view. On Chrome for Android: press the menu button followed by “Request Desktop Site”. [↩]

I have enjoyed reading this page in the past, but have deleted it off my favourites and won’t be returning to read the rants of a mad man, I’ve never read so much bitterness and anger in one post. If you don’t like democracy perhaps you should go and live in China or North Korea.

@all — I usually delete the sort of post above written by @LeaveVoter, but I thought I’d put one up for everyone’s insight. It pairs nicely with this emailed response from a reader I just read:

Love your site have learned so much, but surprised with all your knowledge to find that you favor EU above freedom, who in there right mind would rather jump on to a sinking vessel already overloaded with thieves fiddlers and worse, when they have a chance to restore a proud nation millions have died for?

As everyone who has been around for a while would expect, I will continue to post about politics when I feel like it. I had Leave voters tell me to “get over it and move on” *one week* after the Referendum.

In the real world, that is not how politics or indeed society works. It’s a constant discussion, even a struggle for some (e.g. racial equality in the 1960s) punctuated with occasional landmarks, elections, and whatnot.

We’re only in the foothills of the return of nasty populism. Hopefully it will burn itself out and the worst fears will retrospectively seem like paranoia. If it does go with a whimper it will partly be because people resisted it, and spoke out. Over three million people a year visit this site. I obviously can’t change anything but adding my own modest and no doubt bumbling contributions to the mix might help.

As I said — apparently defensively, I was aiming for empathy — I understand some people might not like these occasional political updates. It’s a free world, and there’s a big Internet out there.

I do appreciate that many readers clearly care enough about the site to share the concerns, here or on email — even or perhaps especially when they disagree with me. That’s sort of humbling. I don’t appreciate it when people try to shut down a conversation on my own website because they don’t like hearing contrary views. Back to The Telegraph comments with that sort.

I have lost a chunk of readers by expressing my views on Brexit. In many (clearly not all, see above) that’s a shame. But I’m not going to self-censor to get a few hundred more page impressions a month. Pfft.

We’re only in the foothills of this return of nasty populism, and hopefully it will burn itself out. If it does it will partly be because people resisted it. If it doesn’t, I don’t want to look back and wonder why I didn’t say anything.

As usual with most of the Brexit posts, closing the comments now we’re at the end of the weekend. Thanks to nearly everyone for their contributions. Back to investing on Tuesday!